Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Aberdare for introducing this topic. We have the economic challenge of building relevant skills for the future and the social challenge of one in 10 youngsters being unemployed. I shall focus on the need to join these two thoughts up by finding ways of upskilling these people for worthwhile jobs—both for their own quality of life and for the sake of the economy.

The most recent government skills survey found that skills shortage vacancies have grown from 6% to 10% in the last five years. Prominent examples include a shortage of 200,000 employees with green skills, three-quarters of businesses with digital skills vacancies, and more than half of our manufacturers struggling to find skilled workers. On the other hand, only 11% of UK workers have advanced digital skills. Last year, the number of young unemployed increased by 10%.

Through my work as a director of Business in the Community, I see at first hand the challenges that young people face in forgotten places across the UK. Let us take, for example, Claremont ward in Blackpool, where there are 480 unemployed individuals in just 12 streets. There is a concentration of families in slum housing where there is a subculture of many youngsters not leaving their bedrooms post-Covid.

Last week, I visited Eastwood primary school in Keighley to understand the challenge in enabling children just to learn to read—a fundamental skill, if they are to go on to get a good job. The school provides a haven of calm for children in an area where parents dare not let them out on the streets. It provides food for families, clothes and a safe place for parents to learn cooking skills. It also ferries children to the dentist because there is not one locally. There are four year-olds with rotten teeth and abscesses which keep them off school. Sadly, these challenges and interventions are common to schools in Claremont, North Earlham, Foleshill and other places where we work.

Looking outside the school system, Pillgwenlly, in Newport, is an ethnically diverse community—more than 32 languages are spoken at the local primary school. On the streets, county lines are commonplace and there is a red light district opposite the police station. Community organisations such as the Newport Yemeni Community Association and Kidcare4U run catch-up clubs for more than 120 children on Saturday mornings. However, funding is due to end in August.

Let me turn to some practical steps that might help. These fall into three categories: first, finding realistic routes to help the young unemployed into work; secondly, helping those in secondary school to understand work and future job opportunities better; and thirdly, supporting heroic teachers in challenging primary schools, so that children can leave feeling confident in themselves and able to read.

Extensive work carried out by the Rank Foundation in Claremont suggests that we need an intermediate labour market to provide opportunities to get the youngsters currently sitting in their bedrooms into work. This involves working eight to 12 hours a week in real work situations, paid at a living wage, which provide dignity and purpose. It would help further if the Department for Work and Pensions considered talking to these people online, rather than insisting they come into the office.

The apprenticeship levy has not been fully spent. I encourage the Government to double down on apprenticeships, making them as flexible as possible but also advising companies that they can pass the levy on to their supply chain, a fact of which many companies are unaware.

In Sheffield, we have recently launched a campaign with local businesses to provide routine and frequent employer encounters for all the schoolchildren in the area. This is based on robust analysis by the Careers & Enterprise Company which suggests these contacts can reduce future likelihood of unemployment by 20%. The advantage of this approach is that businesses can talk directly about current skills needs such as digital or manufacturing.

Finally, national government needs to recognise the challenges and support schools on the front line. I have just one small ask: to provide genuinely accessible NHS dental services to these children. Who knows, one of them might be inspired to become a future dentist.